Alexis Rassine

Alexis Rassine (26 July 1919 – 25 July 1992) was a South African ballet dancer who enjoyed his greatest success with the Sadler's Wells Ballet in England in the 1940s and early 1950s. He is remembered as a classical dancer who made "a major contribution to British ballet" during wartime and "helped to keep the flag flying when all about was chaos and disaster."

Rassine was born Alec Raysman (originally Reisman) in Kaunas, Lithuania, to Jewish Russian parents Israel, an engraver and silversmith at the Faberge workshop, and Sara. His earliest years there involved the family moving around variously between St Petersburg and Lithuania, due to the political situation at the time. Raysman was the youngest of three brothers, the others being Max and Joshua. A fourth brother did not survive infancy. Initially he spoke Russian with his parents and brothers but in 1929, when he was 10, his family moved to Cape Town, South Africa, where he learned to speak English and gained a new nationality. (In later life, he spoke in a distinctive, high-pitched voice with a mid-European accent offset with South African overtones.) As a youth of 14, he began his dance training with Helen Webb and Maude Lloyd, who soon recognized his unusual talent. Encouraged by them, he left South Africa in 1937, when he was 18, and went to Paris, where he continued his studies with the Russian émigré teachers Olga Preobrajenska and Alexandre Volinine. While still a student, he made his professional stage debut dancing in a ballet at the Bal Tabarin, a glamorous cabaret not far from the Palais Garnier, home of the Ballet de l'Opéra de Paris.

Upon failing to win a place in the Paris Opera Ballet, Rassine set his sights on London. Arriving there penniless but talented, at a time when male dancers were in short supply, he found teachers willing to give him free tuition, going to Stanislas Idzikowski in the mornings and to Igor Schwezoff in the evenings. He also studied with Vera Volkova at the Sadler's Wells Ballet School. After a brief stint with Ballet Rambert in 1938, he joined a touring ensemble known as the Trois Arts Ballet, where he gained stage experience and learned fragments of the classical repertory.

On the first of September 1939, while Rassine was still a member of the Trois Arts company, German troops invaded Poland, whereupon England and France declared war on Germany, an event that was to have a dramatic effect on Rassine's burgeoning career. In late 1940, a group of Polish refugees formed the Anglo-Polish Ballet, specializing in Polish folk dances, and Rassine was invited to join. He soon became the leading classical dancer of the company, performing in Michel Fokine's Les Sylphides and Le Spectre de la Rose with Natalia Rossowska. When Ninette de Valois, director of the Sadler's Wells Ballet, came looking for male dancers to replace losses in her war-ravaged company, she was favorably impressed with Rassine but chose another dancer instead, the diminutive Gordon Hamilton, an Australian character dancer and mime. Subsequently, she had second thoughts and also offered Rassine a contract.

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